[Royale Theme just WON'T apply! *after search*]

Thanks for your reply, but I just found out the problem... I used compress.exe (Windows resource Kit) to compress the files. Apparantly Windows Setup doesn't complain about it, but the files are not decompressed during setup.

Then I used makecab.exe to compress the files. However, during setup, Windows Setup always aborted on royale.ms_. Not knowing what was wrong I thought makecab wasn't correct and compress is the way to go. Wrong...

I remembered using modifyPE for the patched UXtheme.dll, so I thought to try modifyPE on the Royale.msstyles file before compressing it with makecab and tadaah... It worked. The custom theme is now used on first boot

[Royale Theme just WON'T apply! *after search*]

ToBe: I'm experiencing a weird problem following your steps. I compressed my theme files, added them to the i386 folder, edited txtsetup.sif and dosnet.inf,...

During setup I don't get any errors. Windows setup copies the theme files correctly to the Resources folder, BUT... it doesn't expand (decompress) the files. For example, royale.ms_ gets renamed to Royale.msstyles, but it's still compressed (bit -by-bit identical to royale.ms_). What step did I miss? Where and how is Windows setup instructed to decompress the files?

[setupreg.hiv not found - unattended setup aborts]

Ok, nevermind this question... I found the problem. It seems the cd-rw media I wrote the image to contains errors. Not sure how they come there, I've used that disc many times before without problems. But when I use another cd-rw disc, setup continues as normal.

[setupreg.hiv not found - unattended setup aborts]

I have a weird problem. I'm at my first attempt to create a simple unattended Windows XP SP2 cd that's stripped from some useless stuff. I used nLite. The cd boots fine, Windows setup starts but after a while it says it cannot find "setupreg.hiv" and the setup aborts. However, when I take a look at the contents of the cd image nLite created, the file "setupreg.hiv" is in the "i386" folder. I'm not sure what's going wrong.

I slipstreamed SP2 into my XP as described on the Microsoft website. Then I used nLite to strip a few programs I don't use (nothing too important). After that I used nLite to create the iso image which I burnt with Nero.

Anyone has an idea what went wrong and how I can fix this?

Update: Well actually setup doesn't say it cannot find the file, it says it cannot load the file. The exact message is:

File setupreg.hiv could not be loaded.

The error code is 32768

But that doesn't help me any further...